Esteemed reader and commenter Georgia asks:
"I'm struggling with how much internal thought to infuse my scenes with. Ahem – with which to infuse my scenes. I want my audience to know that there was internal conflict, so that when things fall apart, it's backed up. But I also want the audience to see how easily swept away I was, and I'm afraid I'll ruin that momentum with too much thought. Help?"
Okay, here's another really good question: How much internal monologue is enough, and how much is too much?
It's great that you're being sensitive to issues of both pacing and plot. On one hand, you want to keep the reader emotionally engaged with the narrator; on the other hand, you want the plot to move forward. So how do you balance the two?
Generally, I think you only need to describe an emotional state when that state changes. If your character starts a conversation feeling good, and over the course of that conversation she starts to realize that something is amiss, then naturally we need to hear that realization occur. But it doesn't have to occur after every single line of dialogue – "(Dialogue) I could tell by his distant tone that something was wrong, and I felt anxious. (Dialogue) There it was again, that distant tone! My anxiety grew. (Dialogue) Now it sounded like he was holding the phone a mile away from his ear, emotionally, that's how distant his tone was, and my anxiety was like one of those novelty sponge animals that comes in a plastic capsule and when you put it in water the capsule dissolves and the sponge expands to 100 times its original size. Boy, was I anxious!" Just one well-placed "I started to feel like I’d swallowed a peach pit, something pointy in my throat that was blocking all the air" will usually do fine.
Because describing emotion is tricky. Most of the time, the events and the dialogue speak for themselves – if someone says something heartbreaking to you, the reader will probably guess that it's heartbreaking, and you don't have to say, "I felt heartbroken." Most of the time, you can go light on the explicit "I felt ____" sentences, unless you're having a surprising emotional reaction – "The doctor said she’d died, and I felt an eerie sense of relief; happiness, even." And if you can show emotion rather than state it – "My lungs filled with lead; I couldn't even gasp for air," instead of "I felt awful" – so much the better.
You also mention "internal conflict," which is often an important part of a story’s plot, and is really hard to represent on paper. How do you show characters' struggles with themselves?
1. You can have one of those internal conversations – "I kept going back and forth between wanting to call, and not wanting to call; wanting to have it over with and yet being afraid to have it finally settled," but it doesn’t have to be a long conversation. Readers will already know what most of the pros and cons of the phone call will be – unless there’s something surprising on that list ("Most of all, I didn’t want to call because I didn’t have my tinfoil hat on, and I was afraid of the gamma rays") you can probably go light on this.
2. You can show it cinematically, through action. If someone is struggling with whether or not to call their friend's ex-boyfriend, even though she knows it's going to hurt the friend, you can show her hesitation through her gestures, her posture, and her reportage of the physical sensations she's experiencing.
So the short answer is: In your first draft, I think you can put in all the internal monologue you want. You can give yourself internal soliloquies that go on for pages, if that's how you identify how you were truly feeling at every single second. And then in the second draft, you can condense those feeling/thinking/deciding moments into short bursts of description, or small actions.
Sound good?
Those Gamma rays are a bitch. This is inspiring to the max. I'm off to write. A million thousand thank yous.
Posted by: Georgia | Apr 04, 2008 at 10:27 AM